Hammel, E. A. and Kenneth W. Wachter, 1995, The Slavonian Census of 1698. Part
I: Structure and Meaning, European Journal of Population.

Microsimulation, other demographic tools, and evidence of history and
ethnography are used to evaluate an important 17th century household census.
Linguistic, ethnographic, and internal evidence allow adjustment of anomalies
in census categories. Microsimulation based on historically and
ethnographically plausible rates and household formation scenarios produces
simulated households in accord with those of the adjusted census. Results
permit estimation of the true population of the region, of the kinship and age
composition of households under frontier conditions, and the probable future
composition of households as the frontier stabilized and land shortage began to
exert pressure for greater density and household complexity. Part I
concentrates on historical, ethnographic, and linguistic evidence.

Keywords: historical demography, family and household, kinship composition,
microsimulation.
1.
Introduction
Historical census returns are a precious source of clues to the social and
economic structure of the past. To be sure, older censuses and population
counts usually include only certain categories of people, and multipliers and
adjustments based on demographic theory have been employed from Hume (1752:419)
onwards to infer total population size and structure from information on
included subsets. Brunt's (1971) estimates of the total free population in
ancient Roman Italy from the Roman Republic's census counts of adult males and
Laiou-Thomodakis' (1977:72-107, 223-66) analysis of household formation and
refined use of household coefficients are classic examples. Until now,
however, such indirect estimation has generally used nothing more than
information on age and sex and sometimes legal or marital status, even though
many surviving nominative household listings are also rich in kinship
information, household by household. The restriction to age and sex reflects
the long-standing reliance on stable population theory, which takes no account
of marital linkages or lateral kinship ties among members of a population.

Indirect estimation is always a two-way process, back and forth between
calculation and textual interpretation. Brunt's (1971:117-20) calculations
with proportions by age and sex led him to conclude that the Roman Imperial
Census under Augustus must have included women and children and excluded
infants; this conclusion induced him to reinterpret the words introducing the
counts in the ancient sources. Likewise, our calculations suggest new
interpretations for some of the language in the 1698 census documents.

The process of inferring totals which the census does not give is closely
related to the task of assessing the plausibility of the information which it
does give. With the 1698 census there is pervasive uncertainty as to whether
kin of certain types are absent in the census because they were not counted or
because they were not present, or because the kinship terms mean more than they
seem. Such questions can never be settled with certainty. However, in this
case, we believe that we have found reasonable solutions to the major puzzles
raised by the census, solutions which are consistent with the data and
compatible with the constraints of demographic plausibility. We would not of
course deny the uncertainty of this and similar historical enterprises that are
obliged to navigate, often by a kind of dead reckoning, between conflicting
dangers in a fog of obscure information, enjoying only an occasional glimpse of
a guiding star or a headland in the data.

This analysis is in two separately published parts (at the suggestion of the
Editor and anonymous reviewers). The first part describes and evaluates one of
the most important and controversial censuses of early modern Europe, the 1698
Austrian Census of Slavonia in what has recently become the independent country
of Croatia (1991). Historical, ethnographic, and linguistic information are
the core of this evaluation and reveal serious problems in any literal
interpretation of the listings. The second part develops a methodology of
re-estimation of the structure and membership of censused households, using
microsimulation techniques, and goes on to estimate the partly counted and
uncounted population of the region in 1698. While the approach here employed
is of course specific to the empirical data at hand, we expect that the general
approaches in these papers can be applied quite widely to nominative census
listings from the past, as long as comparable independent information is
available.
2.
The Census
The census which we examine here is particularly important, because it is the
first in the newly reconquered territory of Slavonia after the ejection of the
Ottomans. Fragments were published by Smiciklas (1891a), a fuller
transcription by Mazuran (1988), and a yet more extensive tabular summary by
Mazuran (1993). Narrowly defined, Slavonia is a triangle lying between the
Drava River on the north and the Sava River on the south, its eastern apex now
ending at the border with the region of Srem, roughly defined by a line between
the western end of the Fruska Gora hills and the Drina-Sava confluence, its
western base along the Ilova River at the modern border of Moslavina. The
location of the districts on which this analysis is based are approximately
given on the map
(Fig. 1).

We address the issue of household composition apparent in the census and use
the tools of historiography, ethnography, and demography to inquire into the
reasonableness of the census and what it may tell us about life on the edge of
Catholic Europe in a period still feudal in its economic and political
organization. (Civil serfdom was abolished in Croatia-Slavonia in 1848;
military serfdom in the Croatian border facing the Ottomans ended only in 1871,
and full civil status was not achieved until 1881.) Because the 1698 census
is regarded as a foundation for the understanding of the social and demographic
history of this historically pivotal frontier region (Gelo and Krivosic 1990,
Mazuran 1988, Stipetic 1988), it is important to maximize the amount of
quantitative information that can be gleaned from it and to assess which
aspects of the text can be taken at face value and which require deeper
interpretation.

There are two facets to the importance of the document. First, it was taken
only 22 years before the date of the first parish records that are still
preserved from central Slavonia (Cernik parish) and provides a baseline for
analysis of a corpus of over 200,000 baptisms, marriages, and burials c.
1714-1900 that show early evidence of fertility control (Hammel 1984, Hammel
1985, Hammel 1990b, Hammel 1993, Hammel 1995, Hammel and Kohler 1995). Second,
it provides evidence for the construction of the historical legitimacy of the
modern Croatian state in the region or conversely for counter-claims by other
ethnic groups that would deny that legitimacy. The ethnic heterogeneity that
led to the collapse of the Yugoslav state in 1991 is already manifest in the
census of 1698.

Some "reading" of this census is unavoidable. No scholar imagines that it can
be taken as a complete listing of all members of the population. It must be
that some categories of persons have been excluded. No one is listed as a
wife, and the number of listed women per listed man is only 0.26. The average
number of listed "sons" and "daughters" per household is only 1.47, which is
much too low for a high-fertility population like this one, as evidence from
parish records c. 1720-80 suggests. Historians generally assume that children
under age 15 were not listed and that married women were not listed unless they
were widowed heads of households, but they caution that the social evaluation
of age may have played a role. Our analysis, spelled out in later sections,
lends support to this view. But historians have not come to grips with what
other categories may or must have been excluded, and with what the total
membership of households should have looked like, counting unlisted and listed
members together. These are the questions we address.

Throughout, we depend heavily on an extensive corpus of historical and
ethnographic investigation, some of it going back to as early as the 1760s in
Habsburg Croatia or to the 14th Century in mediaeval or Ottoman Serbia, but
especially on materials published by Croatian ethnographers since 1896.[1] These materials are especially
consistent in their depiction of traditional household formation, and they
accord well with the anthropological literature on patrilineally organized
societies.

Initial scrutiny of the recorded census reveals two great puzzles in a
territory characterized then and later by the strong patrilineal extended and
fraternal joint household organization at least later typical of this part of
the Balkans.

* Why are there no brothers listed as coresident kin in the first 14 (eastern)
districts visited by the census commission, whereas brothers are listed in the
last three (western) districts (the Brothers Puzzle)?

* Why is the number listed as "daughters" so sizable a fraction of the number
listed as "sons", especially if daughters only included the unmarried and sons
included married and unmarried alike (the Sons and the Daughters Puzzle)?

Other, related puzzles also exist, for example the complete absence of listed
sisters or sons-in-law, and these will also be addressed.
3.
Historical Background
The Croatian tribes occupied the basins of the Sava and Drava rivers and,
according to some claims, also the territory between the Drina and the Adriatic
(i.e. Bosnia-Hercegovina) around the 8th or 9th century. They were closely
related linguistically to other Slavic groups in the Alpine regions even
westward into the Tyrol (now the Slovenes), to others still further north and
northeast (now the Czechs and Slovaks) and to still others to the south and
southeast (now the Serbs). The Germanic advance to the east after the 9th
century cleared most of the Alpine zone of Slavs (except in modern Slovenia and
Carinthia) and separated the Croats from the Slavs of Bohemia, Moravia,
Slovakia and the Ciscarpathian Ukraine. Beginning in the 10th century the
Croats came under increasing Magyar influence and by 1102 had recognized
Hungarian suzerainty. Habsburg knowledge and administration of Slavic groups
was confined to the Alpine (Slovenian) and more northerly Slavs. It is
important to note that there is no historical evidence for joint family
structure among the Alpine Slavs (Winner 1971); these Slavs seem to have had
nuclear or stem family households, although the tradition of joint family
organization has very deep Indo-European roots. The Alpine Slavs may have
adopted nuclear and stem organization quite early, perhaps for ecological
reasons. We have no direct historical evidence on family organization in
Croatia between the 12th and 18th centuries, but we do have good evidence from
documents of the 14th and 15th centuries that joint family organization was
well established among Orthodox groups. After the Ottoman victory at Kosovo in
1389 and more northerly conquests up to the fall of Bosnia in 1493 and of
Belgrade in 1521, Orthodox (or what would now be called Serbian) refugees began
to flow into what is now Croatian territory. The degree to which the Habsburgs
became familiar with such organization is unknown; they played no
administrative role with respect to such groups until after the collapse of the
Hungarian state in 1526, and clear evidence of their cognizance of joint family
organization is not apparent until 1737 with the institution of the
Hildburghausen reforms (see below).

The Ottoman advance deep into Pannonia after their overwhelming victory at
Mohacs in 1526 is thought to have emptied Slavonia of much of its Croatian
Catholic peasantry. From Bosnia and Serbia into this population vacuum between
1526 and 1683 flowed large numbers of islamicized Slavs, Turks, and other
ethnic groups. Some unknown and disputed proportion of the native population
remained. There also came large numbers of Orthodox (and some Catholics) of
pastoral economy, known as Vlachs. The word "Vlach" has complex meanings. Here
it is best understood as "pastoralist" or "inmigrant." Most Vlachs were
Orthodox, but some were Catholic, a distinction that in modern times would be
read as Serbian versus Croatian. (See Rothenberg 1966 :16). The remaining
Croatian nobility on the fringes of the Alpine zone (e.g. near Graz) and west
of the Ilova to the Adriatic, thence around the shoulder of Bosnia about to
Zadar began to organize a military defense zone about 1525 in the vicinity of
Senj, into which they invited refugees from Bosnia, many of whom were Orthodox,
to serve as military serfs who received land in return for perpetual military
service
(Fig. 2). At the same time (1526), the Croat nobles recognized the
suzerainty of the Habsburgs. By the last part of the 16th century
administration of the Border fell to the Inner Austrian Estates (Styria,
Carniola and Carinthia), although the Croatian feudatories continually
struggled to maintain their own control of the region. By the 1680s the
military zone included the highlands from a point north of Knin and west of the
modern border of Bosnia north to the Kupa, thence east to the Ilova, then in a
northward extension west of the Ilova to the Drava, protecting Zagreb. In
1683 when the removal of the Ottomans from Slavonia began, the Croatian
feudatories assumed direct control of Regiments V and VI (the "Banska"
regiments, i.e. under control of the Croatian Ban, or king), although general
military policy was still set by the Austrians. The Border was subsequently
extended to the Danube by 1718 and afterwards into the Carpathians. The
Transylvanian regiments were decommissioned after 1848 and the Croatian Border
was reunited with Civil Croatia only in 1881. Vestiges of its social
organization, e.g. communal ownership of forest, remained in force until
1945.

Codification of the direct subordination of the Border population to the
Emperor appeared in the Statuta Valachorum ("the law of the Vlachs",
herinafter SV) in 1630. Rothenberg (1966 :11) claims that the SV recognized
the traditional joint family household (zadruga, Hauskommunion)
as the "recipient of the land grant". This is far from certain; Rothenberg's
source (Sucevic 1953) notes only that the Vlachs lived in joint family
households. Indeed, Article 8 of the SV explicitly gives shares in the estate
to children of both sexes, an idea quite contrary to the exclusively agnatic
inheritance of South Slavic customary law under which women do not inherit real
property or stock. It also reveals an expectation of primogenitural
inheritance typical of Germanic stem family organization.

Prof. Karl Kaser (personal communication and 1986, 1994a, 1994b) has kindly
shared his insights on the legal status of the joint family and notes that the
uskoci (guerilla fighters, Bordermen) of the Zumberacka Gora
(Sichelberger Uskoken) received special feudal privileges in 1535 and lived in
joint family households, but the privileges accorded them make no mention of
zadruga ownership or inheritance. Only in 1737 with the establishment of the
Hildburghausen reforms are zadruga ownership and the inheritance practices of
customary law recognized. Habsburg military officers at the local
level were certainly familiar with the joint household organization of their
soldiers, especially since the regions west of Karlovac were than, as now,
preponderantly Orthodox, among whom joint family organization is clearly
traditional from the mediaeval Serbian evidence. That portion of the Border
running north from the Sava to the Drava just east of Zagreb had a lower
proportion of Orthodox. Whether the distinct civil administrators of the
Hofkammer in Vienna or even of the Inner Austrian Estates understood
this organization, being familiar only with administration of the Alpine Slavs,
is moot. As we will see, a possible misunderstanding about the status of
persons within joint households may have contributed to curious discrepancies
in the listings.

Before the historic Ottoman defeat at Vienna in 1683, the population of
Slavonia is thought to have been about 200,000. After seven years of
destructive fighting following 1683, the subsequent Ottoman defeat within
Slavonia in 1691, and the flight of the Muslim population and some of its
allies, the number is said to have been only about 40,000 (Mazuran 1988:40). A
formal peace was achieved in 1699 with the Treaty of Carlowitz (Karlovci), but
relations between the interested superpowers (Austria, Venice, and the Porte)
were not settled until the Treaty of Pozarevac in 1718. The exact
ethnic/religious composition of the remnant population is unknown, although
most Croatian historians seem to assume that it was mostly Catholic and Croat.
The region was then flooded presumably by mostly Catholic migrants from other
regions of Croatia and Hungary, and by Christian refugees from Bosnia, many of
whom were Orthodox. Especially important was a strong flow of 30,000 Orthodox
refugee families who crossed into Habsburg territory from Serbia in 1690 after
the Austrian defeat and the failed Serbian uprising incited by the Habsburgs at
Pec (in Kosovo-Metohija) in 1689. These Orthodox refugees were resettled
mostly in southern Hungary and the eastern apex of Slavonia and in the more
western regions near the Ilova River. By 1698 the population of Slavonia
itself is thought to have reached between 65,000 and 80,000 (Gelo and Krivosic
1990:17, Mazuran 1988:42), implying an annual increase between 5 and 10 percent
from 1691 to 1698. Gelo and Krivosic (1990:21) give the population in 1780 as
380,700, so that the growth rate from 1698 to 1780 would have slowed to between
about 1.5 and 2 percent. Rothenberg's work on the Military Border (1960 , 1966
) and Capo's (1990, 1991) and Gelo and Krivosic's (1990) analyses of family
names suggest that growth before about 1700 was driven mostly by migration but
after 1780 mostly by natural increase, migration having slowed except into a
few towns. The growth rate after cessation of the migration flow was a few
percent per annum. We conjecture from these data that we might expect about 2
percent per annum in crude natural increase around the time of the census in
1698.

One consequence of the Ottoman defeat was an enlargement of the Border (Fig.
2). The Croatian Sabor (Assembly) raised its own troops after 1683 and
by 1690 had liberated the region south of the Kupa and from about the Glina to
the Sava-Una confluence; thereafter the Croatian feudatories were in control of
this region, although it was considered part of the overall Border
organization. The Habsburgs extended the border in a narrow strip on the left
bank of the Sava from the Una eastward, eventually (by the Treaty of Pozarevac
in 1718) to the Danube (and ultimately into Transylvania). Part of the task of
the census of 1698 was to decide where the northern boundary of the military
zone should be. The military authorities wanted that zone to be as wide as
possible, while the civilian authorities (who were in actual charge of the
census) wanted that zone to be narrow, leaving as much reconquered territory as
possible as spoils to be divided among favorites of the Court or sold to the
highest bidder among the magnates.

The shifting tides of humanity 1683-1698 must stand as one of the most
substantial population turnovers in early modern Europe (Stipetic 1988).
Strong traces of the resulting ethnic differences remain even today in the
dialect distributions and political conformations of the area.
4.
The Census of 1698
In 1698 a commission of the Austrian Crown conducted the first thorough and
non-ecclesiastical census of the 12,500 square kilometers between the Ilova,
Drava and Sava rivers that had just been liberated from the Ottoman Empire.
The census was undertaken to solve pressing questions of governmental
organization and lay the basis for taxation and conscription, especially the
extension of the Military Border along the Sava line. Planning for it began in
October, 1691 after a failed Turkish counter-offensive, when the defeat of the
Ottomans seemed certain, and the spoils of war within the Habsburg grasp.
(Nevertheless, skirmishes with the Ottomans continued and indeed prevented the
taking of the census or precensal reconnaissance in some areas, e.g. Srem.) It
was executed only after protracted conflict between the civil and military arms
of Habsburg administration and between them and the native Croatian nobility,
all three of whom were competing for control of the new territories. The
commission held an orientation for its district enumerators on March 3, 1698
and then traveled widely, taking testimony, redressing wrongs, and adjudicating
disputes. The enumerators finished their work with few incidents by the middle
of August. The actual implementation of the census was done by four work
groups in four geographic areas. The first group worked in the arc from the
Drava to the Sava, north of the central Slavonian massif and and down the
Ilova, including the extreme western districts, the second from the Drava along
the Sava drainage up to the limits of the western districts, the third in the
Pozega basin and its surrounding mountains, and the fourth in the city of
Osijek in the Drava basin. See Fig. 1. The census was received with
apprehension by the populace, and 500 families are reported to have fled
Slavonia to avoid it. In one village of District 20 (Mala Vlaska), the
enumerator, one Gabriel Hapcz, was made to cool his heels for a week until the
inhabitants received firm answers from higher authorities on certain questions
of feudal status and tax and corvée liability . In each place, a pair
of local, responsible persons was sworn to their task by a formidable oath in
Latin and in Croatian and collected the census information. The information
was almost surely collected in the local Slavic vernacular and then transcribed
into Latin, whether first through a translation into German or directly, we do
not know. We also do not know whether the sworn census takers actually
visited the households in their catchment area, or interviewed the household
heads, or whether they practiced what has come to be known as "curbside
estimation." According to Mazuran (1993:24) all of the census takers and their
assistants went through the same orientation in Osijek on March 3, 1698, but
these did not include the "pair of village notables or elder persons" who
reported to the census takers. It is possible that the official enumerators
interviewed the pair of village elders, who reported from memory and their own
knowledge without actually visiting the households. The average number of
households per village was about 13, with district means ranging from 5 to
35.

The census listed (with supposedly standardized omissions) the members of
households by category of kinship with the household head, the number of
inquilini ("lodgers")[2] in each
household and that of the sons and daughters of such lodgers, by district by
village, together with their productive assets, down to the individual
beehive.[3] Some villages or blocks of
households within them are shown as having migrated from Bosnia, and such
origin is also often evident in familial names, e.g. Bosnyak. As noted
earlier, historians generally assume that children under age 15 were not
listed, and married women were not listed unless they were widowed heads of
households. There are 82 widows, or two percent of the households. Fully a
third (28) of the widows are in the city of Pozega.

In a long account for each settlement, apparently based on a standard protocol
since the paragraphs are consistently numbered, the census reported the history
of settlement during the Turkish period and the recent war, the military role
of the population, their religious affiliation, their needs, their feudal
obligations, and limits on productivity such as the quality of land,
insufficiency of cattle for plowing, and so on.

An example of a household listing is the following from the village of Jazavica
in the district of Kraljeva Velika near the Ilova-Sava confluence in the
west:

Mazuran's tabulation (1993:29-30) shows 464 occupied and 165 unoccupied
villages (pagus desertus) in 28 named regions, and 6,613 households
containing 385 brothers, 3,949 sons, 2,725 daughters, and 1,368
inquilini.8 Our own analysis is based not on his summary
tabulations (which are themselves probably based on the village level summaries
in the census) but on the detailed household level data for 4,453 households in
those 330 villages in 17 districts for which the recording gave information on
the kinship relation of residents to the household head.[9], [10] The missing districts are
concentrated at the north end of the Drava valley. Because of this
concentration it is possible that there is some selection bias in the corpus.
The Drava valley was the main route for armies moving between Belgrade and
Vienna and probably suffered equally from the Ottomans and the Habsburgs.
However, there is no reason to think that the northern end of the Drava valley
was affected more severely than the southern, which is represented in the
census.
4.
Expectations of Household Structure
Ethnographies of the region have always stressed the extended and fraternal
joint households found there, called zadruga (lit. "cooperative") by
intellectuals but not called anything in particular by peasants. Households
are simply called kuca (Serbia) or hiza (Croatia), meaning
"house." Sometimes the words porodica or vamilija (Serbia) or
obitelj (Croatia), meaning "family", are used. Peasants sometimes
identify nuclear households by a special phrase, e.g. inokosna kuca,
"lonesome house." The literature on "the zadruga" is enormous. (For recent
discussion see Halpern and Wagner 1984, Hammel 1968 , Hammel 1972 , Hammel
1980a, Hammel 1990a, Hammel and Soc 1973, Todorova 1993). The formation of such
households is rooted in ancient Indo-European principles of agnatic
filiation and reflected in the kinship terminologies of Slavic and
other languages, including Early Latin (Hammel 1957, Hammel 1968 , Lounsbury
1964).[11] Their existence in the
area is suggested by mediaeval Serbian sources combined with 17th century
evidence on Orthodox populations, Croatian historical sources of the 18th-19th
centuries, and Austrian statutes of the 18th century. They exhibit, on the
ethnographic evidence, what in anthropological jargon is called patrivirilocal
residence, that is, a bride lives with her husband in the household of his
father. If such principles of coresidence are followed without frequent
fission, then under conditions of positive natural increase households can
become quite large and complex, containing married cousins related in the male
line, and may reach a membership in excess of a hundred. Households of these
sizes, although rare, have been reported from the 19th and early 20th
centuries. The size of larger households may be a function of increased
expectation of life which continues the authority of the paterfamilias for
longer (Halpern and Anderson 1970), and of emerging land shortage that forced
denser coresidence and more intensive agriculture (Hammel 1990b, Hammel
1995). However, households have principles of fission as well as
of fusion, and in fact even with strong rules of initial coresidence, divisive
factors generally resulted in about 50 percent of households in a census being
nuclear. So powerful was the tradition of complex households that Croatian and
Serbian ethnographers almost uniformly regarded their division as a social
pathology, not recognizing the cyclical nature of household formation.
Peasants understand division very well and have institutionalized procedures
for the division of property. They usually attribute division to arguments
between female affines, that is between the wives of coresident sons or
brothers, showing thus that agnatic filiation is a cultural principle as well
as a social one. Indeed, the mother's brother (ujak), as a cognatically
close but agnatically unrelated elder, often presided over such divisions as a
distinterested outsider. (See Hammel 1968 , Hammel 1972 , Hammel 1976 , Hammel
1977, Hammel 1980a, Hammel 1980b, Todorova 1993). Fission of households in
this region may be expected to take place typically as sons of coresident
brothers approach puberty or adulthood, and domestic conflicts emerge between
those who are not sons of the same father and thus not bound by immediate
agnatic solidarity, which in patrilineal societies is typically strongest among
brothers and progressively weaker for cousins of increasing collaterality.
In the presence of the preferences that ethnography and history lead us to
expect, and despite the potency of processes of fission, we would imagine that
the census would expose particular kinds of evidence of such complex
structures, especially in the fertile plains and hills of Slavonia, where large
and complex households were common in later times, particularly in the Military
Border where military labor demands encouraged large households. The censuses
of 1702 and 1736 (Gelo and Krivosic 1990, Mazuran 1993), overlapping in area
with that of 1698, and the work of Capo on villages of central Slavonia in the
18th and 19th centuries show abundant evidence of such complexity. Population,
density, and complexity appear to increase as land resources remained
relatively constant.
Since households without sons but with at least one daughter would on the
marriage of the latter "import" her husband; we would expect at least some
trace of households with in-marrying sons-in-law, whose status has distinct
names in various dialects of Serbo-Croatian.[12] Even if patrilocal extended
households dissolved rapidly, and even if fraternal joint households lacking
the binding authority of the father dissolved even more rapidly, we would
expect some incidence of fraternal joint households of orphans, since unmarried
sons would become unmarried brothers on the death of their parents and would
remain together for a time even if they did not coreside with a married
brother. Such households would often contain sisters. We would expect at
least some nephews in households cohabited by brothers unless the cycle of
fission was unusually rapid, and even some cousins in a large sample of
households.
5.
Census versus Expectations
These expectations come up short against the census document itself, even in
intuitive examination. Table 1 shows the mean number of kin of expectably
included types as reported in the census. There are no coresident brothers
reported in vast stretches of Slavonia, specifically in all but the three
western districts of Stupcenica, Subocka, and Kraljeva Velika (nos. 21, 22,
and 23). There is only one brother, in one household in one village in
District 20 (Mala Vlaska). If the absence of reported brothers in the eastern
zone is taken to mean an absence of actual brothers, this is an unbelievable
outcome for a population with the kind of kinship and household system so
consistently reported in the ethnographies and mediaeval history and recognized
by 1737 in Austrian statute. There are no sisters listed in the census, even
though we would expect some orphaned unmarried sisters to remain until marriage
in households headed by a brother. There are no nephews listed, even in
households in which there are brothers. If it were true that the 1698 census
would have listed nephews if they were present, these data can only mean that
married brothers left the joint household before their sons reached
countability. There are no nieces. There are no grandchildren of countable
age. There are no cousins listed, even though as noted in the traditional
joint families agnatic cousins do sometimes coreside. There are no in-marrying
sons-in-law listed. More broadly, there are no wives listed at all. Words for
all these relationships exist both in the local Slavic vernaculars and often as
regular words in Latin.[13]

There is not a single instance of the naming of a person of a generation older
than the head of household. Thus there are no fathers, no mothers, no uncles,
even though surviving mothers and debilitated elder males were surely
coresident with sons or nephews who had assumed headship. That means either
that the census takers must always have taken a male of the senior generation,
or failing that a widow, as the head of household, or that they did not count
males beyond some age or in some condition of disability unless they were
solitaries or in isolated spousal pairs.

How can we account for such discrepancies? We wondered whether this important
census should be consigned to the dustbin, or whether there was some way to
rescue it.
6.
Some Unsatisfactory Explanations for Curiosities in the Census
In the customary ethnic and political logic of the Balkans, explanations for
some of the anomalies and regional differences fairly leap to mind. The
Orthodox are reputed to have larger families, a more archaic family
organization, and to have been involved more in military feudalism. Under
Austrian practice, complex households were encouraged in order to to insure the
economic viability of households if men were sent on military duty, and the per
capita burden of military service was lessened if households contained more
adult males. The concentration of "brothers" in the western zone would be easy
to attribute to the prevalence of Orthodox Serbs and the general importance of
military rule there. But a detailed comparison at the village level shows that
almost all districts were heterogeneous in religion, ethnicity, military versus
civil status, and household organization. Indeed, even villages were sometimes
heterogeneous in these respects. Apart from small differences in household
size and relative numbers of kinds of kin, contemporary military involvement or
religion/ethnicity seemed to make little difference in household organization.
Some districts in which brothers are listed were finally included in the formal
Military Border, but some were not. Most importantly, there were very
substantial numbers of Orthodox Serbs in regions and villages in which no
brothers were listed at all. We were unable to construct reasonable
explanations for household structural differences based on ethnicity or
political status.[14]7.
Census Redux
Though not impossible, it would certainly be surprising if persons such as
those omitted were not in Slavonian households as they existed in actual
operation. It would be less surprising if the kinship terms used in the census
meant more than they seem. A fundamental point of this analysis rests on the
anthropological commonplace that it is a gross error to assume the same
genealogical or social meanings for kinship terms across languages, especially
in using the most restricted meaning in one language to gloss the apparently
matching term in another.

Were the kinship terms employed to designate persons defined by the immediate
genealogical denotation of the Latin words? Were the Latin words glosses on
Slavic kinship terms but still interpretable in a narrow genealogical context?
Were the Latin words, on the other hand, convenient glosses for socially
defined categories?[15] In other
words, does filius mean precisely a child of the head, or does it mean a
lineally related male member of the household one or more generations below
that of the head of household, or even just a junior male? Does fratres
mean exactly a male child with the same parents as the head, or any
collateral male relative of the same generation as the head? Does filia
mean a female relative analogous to filius in any of the senses given
above for filius, or can it also mean any unmarried female in the house
who is a jural minor, thus including persons that would have been listed as
soror (sister) if that word had been used anywhere in the census?

Everything that anthropologists know about kinship usage would suggest that the
kinship terms used in the census would have broad, rather than narrow meanings.
Exactly how broad the meanings were, we cannot say, but some aspects of the
local culture and language, and some features of the internal structure of the
census are informative.

Where "son" is given in the listings, it appears not only after the head of the
household but also after any brothers that may be listed. Since "nephews" are
not listed by the literal Latin term (nepos), we conclude that "son"
means the son of either the head of household or of any listed brothers, so
that "son" in the census means sons plus nephews. We also note that in South
Slavic joint family organization the sons of coresident brothers are socially
equivalent, and that the term for "brother's son" in some dialects
(sinovac) is a linguistic derivative of the term for son (sin).
If people were reported in Slavic but noted in Latin, these effects might
easily appear. For all of these reasons we consider filius in the
census to mean at least sons plus nephews of the head. The clinching argument
is the positional one from the census listings: head, brothers, "sons." One
could go further by including grandsons under the social rubric of sons, but we
do not explicitly make that extension. Parallel arguments (except for the
linguistic derivative of brother's son from son) apply to filia
(daughter), and we consider filia in the census to mean at least
daughters plus nieces of the head. Further consideration of the meaning of
filia will be pursued below.

The term fratres (brother) occurs in the census only in the three
westernmost districts. (See the example of the Philipovich household given
earlier.) It is not found in the other fourteen. In these fourteen there are
many "lodgers" listed (inquilini), but no "lodgers" are listed in the
three westernmost districts (see the example of the Ternovazan household listed
earlier). There is only one exception to this distribution: in one village in
one eastern district verging on the western three, where "lodgers" are listed;
there is one listed brother in one household, but there are no lodgers in that
household. The geographical distribution of lodgers and brothers is thus
completely disjoint. We propose that the Austrian census takers, familiar with
a stem family system of the Alpine regions in which non-inheriting sons could
stay on with their inheriting brother as Knechte (farmhands), usually
classified coresident brothers as lodgers. They could have done so even if
they were familiar with the zadruga form of organization, provided that
they did not fully appreciate that all males were equal coparceners in the
zadruga estate, regardless of which one was the head. The exceptions to
the general absence of brothers all occur in the area enumerated by census work
group I, headed by the unlucky Gabriel Hapcz (see above). Indeed, the change
from lodgers to brothers occurs exactly in the village of Podborje, where the
inhabitants obliged Mr. Hapcz to wait. We suppose that for almost all of their
tour this work group used the same definitions as other work groups, changing
the terminology only at the end, perhaps because they decided to use the
kinship term rather than the misapplied status term to describe the
relationship. Whether the near-revolt of the populace altered their linguistic
or cultural sensitivity can only be a matter of amused speculation. For our
purposes, we therefore classify "lodgers" as "brothers", "lodger's sons" as
"sons", and "lodger's daughters" as "daughters." If there were truly unrelated
lodgers in households in the eastern zone, our equivalencing will overestimate
brothers in that zone, but we think probably not by much. In later times
Austrian military administrators managing land allotments and supervising the
organization of zadrugas sometimes did oblige unrelated persons to
coreside in order to maintain sufficient military strength on the homestead,
but such arrangements were rare.

Beyond this we note that in the local Slavic dialects of the time (and indeed
in many of them today such as in standard Serbian), siblings and cousins are
denoted by the same word. Both a brother and a male cousin are brat
(cognate with English "brother), and both a sister and a female cousin are
sestra (cognate with English "sister"). (See notes 11-13.) Socially,
male cousins of the head in a joint household are equivalent to his brothers.
If counts of people were reported in Slavic and glossed in Latin, these effects
could easily occur. For all of these reasons, we consider the Latin gloss,
fratres, to be equivalent to the Slavic brat, and to mean not
only brothers (and lodgers, as indicated earlier) but also male cousins.

Finally, and with some trepidation, we reconsider the Latin filia, which
we have held to mean both "daughter" and "niece", analogously to filius.
It will be remembered that there are no sisters as such listed in the census,
although some must have existed at countable ages. We propose that it is
reasonable to consider the Latin filia as a gloss for all countable
unmarried women. There is no direct linguistic or structural evidence
internal to the census for this terminological merger, contrary to the
situation for the other interpretations above. Nevertheless, the merger is
ethnographically reasonable, since all unmarried daughters, nieces, and sisters
were jural minors in their household and expected to depart it on marriage.
All nubile women, in this sense, are "daughters of the lineage" (Hammel 1957,
Hammel 1968 , Lounsbury 1964). There is some indirect linguistic
evidence even though the Slavic terms for sister (sestra) and daughter
(kci, kcer, cerka) are distinct and never confused. The husbands of
daughters and of sisters are known by a single Slavic kinship term
(zet); that is, son-in-law and brother-in-law are identically named;
sisters and daughters are the wives or potential wives of identically named
men. We would not suggest this terminological merger if any "sister"
(soror) had been listed as such in the census at all, but none were, and
the interpretation seems not unreasonable. To accommodate this possibility, we
later present both interpretations of the census counts, in one of which
filia means daughters and nieces, and in the other of which it means
these plus sisters. In either of these instances, we could include
granddaughters under the social rubric of daughters, but we do not do so
explicitly here.

The results of these re-readings of the text are shown in Table 2. We propose
that these linguistically and ethnographically informed "readings" of the
census text do much to resolve the Brother's Puzzle, the Son's Puzzle, and the
Daughter's Puzzle. The outcome is an "adjusted census", in which the
counts of persons are affected only insofar as "lodgers" are merged with
"brothers", and the children of lodgers are merged with "sons" and "daughters".
It is the interpretation of these counts that is most changed, a shift
that has meaning when we go on in Part II to compare the simulation results
with the census and use these interpretations to aggregate the exactly
classifiable computer-simulated coresidents into the categories we think were
intended by the census takers.
10.
Conclusion
In this paper we examined an important foundation document for the history of
Croatia and of the Balkans in general, asking whether the counts of kin within
households were plausible in the light of general knowledge of the ethnography
and history of the region. The first answer to that question is clearly
negative. The census listings, if interpreted literally, make no sense.
Expectable and important categories of kin are entirely missing even under the
apparent census protocol, while the counts of those included are inconsistent
with plausible qualitative expectations.

As a first step in the rehabilitation of the census for scholarly study we
reconsidered the meanings of the kinship terms as reported in Latin. Some were
given broader meanings on the grounds of structural features of the listings
(filius as son plus nephew, filia as daughter plus niece). Some
were given broader scope on the grounds of the meanings of the Slavic glosses
in Serbo-Croatian (fratres = brat as brother plus cousin). An
extension of filia = daughter plus niece plus sister was proposed on the
basis of the legal status of unmarried females in patrilineal systems and
tentatively implemented. A plausible extension of filius = son plus
nephew plus grandson (and similarly for filia) was considered but not
implemented.

These qualitative steps transform the census listings into a more reasonable
and believable corpus, better in accord with the expectations generated by
ethnography and history. In Part II of our enterprise we will turn to
microsimulation techniques to obtain more precisely drawn quantitative
expectations of coresident kin, using a range of plausible demographic
scenarios and the most likely household formation scenario and census protocol.
From those results we will go on to estimate the population that was counted
only by enumeration of household heads rather than by coresidents in households
and to estimate the population that was indicated only by counts of households
or villages. The results accord closely with population counts estimated by
other means by Croatian historians and lead us to consider other processes such
as migration, the instability of large households, and the need to combine very
small households in the turbulent environment at the close of the 16th century
when a temporary peace with the Ottomans was within grasp.

The
italicized kinship terms suggest what the census categories really might have
included.Acknowlegements

This research was supported by grant DBS-9120159 from the National Science
Foundation and grant RO1 HD 29512 from the National Institute of Child Health
and Human Development of NIH, and by the facilities of the Department of
Demography, the Institute of International Studies at the University of
California, Berkeley, the Institute for the Study of Ethnology and
Folkloristics and the Archive of Croatia, both of Zagreb. None of these
institutions is responsible for the data or interpretations found in this
paper.